CRAVING
By Yvonne Navarro
1965.
The girl is very... still.
The knot of kids gathered around her is growing, and Andre lets them prod him forward on the sidewalk, until his foot is almost touching hers. Everything about the girl is small, like him--small hands, small feet, a small, upturned button nose that’s leaking a bright, shocking double line of blood down each flushed pink cheek until it disappears into her fine, blonde hair. On her forehead is a blue-black lump the size of a robin’s egg, the kiss of the monkey bar’s metal when she slipped and fell.
“Move aside—you kids get out of the way right now!”
One of the teachers is finally pushing through the crowd. Andrew doesn’t know the teacher’s name, just like he doesn’t know the little girl’s name. He moves back with the others and watches as the man touches a spot on her neck. Another teacher, a woman, has followed into the center of things, and he tells her to call an ambulance, then turns back to the gawking kids and gestures at them angrily. “Go on, now—there’s nothing to see here! Take off!”
Most of them obey, but not all.
Not Andre.
He hangs off to the side with one or two other kids, as close as he dares, enduring the aggravated glances of the teachers and the medics. As long as he stays back far enough, they let him alone—what are they going to do, chase after him? They are far too concerned with the girl, whose face has gone from a fragile, china-white to gray, the color of a concrete sidewalk beneath the hot sun. Andre can feel the surface of his eyes drying out because he’s not blinking, he’s too afraid he’ll miss something. Eventually they lift the girl onto a Gurney and put her in the ambulance, and she disappears into the distance amid a circling of flashing red and white lights and lingering exhaust fumes.
Andre never finds out what happens to her, but he thinks a lot about the little girl over the next couple of days, wondering if she died, if maybe she was dead before they put her into the ambulance. He doesn’t think so because on television they—that ambiguous, omnipotent group of people who seem to control such things— always put a sheet over dead bodies. Still, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t dead now; she could have died on the way to the hospital, or afterwards when the doctors’ treatment of her injuries failed. It doesn’t matter. He will never find out since the girl doesn’t go to his school.
* * *
Andre is twenty-four when he meets Rebecca while standing a few feet away from a horrible accident. There aren’t many people at the scene—apparently this one is a bit too much for most of the usual gawkers. Andre has been living in this neighborhood for almost three years, since he graduated from college, and there has been a steady stream of accidents at this corner. They usually happen at the intersection where the commuter train crosses the four-lane street and drivers, those who are willing to gamble with their lives in the hopes of getting to work a little faster, lose the game. It is Rebecca who approaches him—Andre is far too engrossed in his study of the man lying on the side of the road a few feet away to pay attention to any of the surrounding crowd.
“Do you think he felt any pain?”
Andre glances to his left and sees the woman who staged-whispered the question, then takes a second look. Like him, she is pale and small-boned, but where he has dirty blonde hair, hers is cut short and so dark it can only be described as gothic. Her dark eyes are wide with curiosity, like pools filled with glistening, black light. A layer of lip gloss makes her lips glitter as much as her eyes.
It is rare that something that can divert his attention from the scene of an accident or its victim, but this woman does—he has to force his attention to go back to the man lying on the ground only a few feet away. Considering what happened, it’s surprising that the police haven’t demanded he move back, but they’re still too busy talking to the bus driver. The driver is a pudgy, middle-aged black woman whose face has gone gray with shock and guilt as she tries to explain what she doesn’t understand. Andre hears her –
“I don’t know. I was just driving past. He was standing on the curb and I glanced at the side mirror and saw him jerking all around, and then he just fell over. There was a bump under the back tires, and then... and then....”
She can’t continue, but the rest of the story is on the ground at their feet. One of the young man’s shoes pokes out from the bottom of a snow-colored sheet; at the other end, the top, the sheet is soaked with scarlet blood and disturbingly flat. It is the best accident scene that Andre has ever been to.
“No,” he says to the woman at his side. “He had the seizure, fell in the street in front of the back wheel, and then it was lights out.”
“That’s what I think, too.” She nods, then looks sideways at him. “My name is Rebecca. I think I’ve... seen you before.”
Andre considers this. He doesn’t go out much, so if she has seen him, it’s either on his way to his job or at another time like this one, when he’s worked his way closer to the front lines to catch the details of some traffic accident or other incident. It’s a long shot, but... is she like him? Secretly studying the damage that can be done to the fragile shell of the human body by so many things? No, of course not—that’s impossible.
When she speaks again, her voice is quieter and a little breathless. “I saw you a couple of weeks ago. When that kid on the bicycle....”
She doesn’t have to finish—Andre knows what she’s talking about and, now that his mind fills with mental photos and revisits that afternoon, he remembers her, too. Her and... yes. That guy over there, about ten feet away. An average man with thick brown hair, glasses, average build; nothing special about him... except for the hunger in his eyes as he stares down at the red Rorschach pattern at the top of the sheet. As Andre looks at him, the guy suddenly lifts his gaze and meets Andre’s eyes. Something knowing passes between them, a kinship, before the man smiles faintly and returns to his study of the dead man in the street. Andre’s forehead creases as his gaze scans the crowd and sees more than a few familiar faces, the same people who, like him, come out when destiny does its worst.
Rebecca moves closer, and Andre jerks a little when she slides her hand against his. Without knowing why, he twines his fingers around hers. Actually, that isn’t true. He knows precisely why he hangs onto this strange, wraithlike woman—because she is like him, and like the man a few yards away, and like the others he has recognized here and there throughout the years. Fascinated by pain, by death, by that rarely seen interval between violence and eternity. It is a captivation that disgusts most people... at least on the surface. Inside, where no one else knows the truth and beneath where so-called normalcy and decorum binds the senses and monitors the behavior, Andre thinks that the majority of mankind is exactly like him. But in the meantime....
Where in his life there was once only him, there is now him and Rebecca.
* * *
Theirs is an existence that most do not understand. The apartment in which they live is a monument to disasters and accidents, filled with framed prints showing wrenching scenes from September 11th—the collapsing towers, an unidentified woman falling through the air in an almost absurdly graceful position as she exercises her only escape from the killing black smoke and agonizing flames. Another wall bears photographs from the Oklahoma City bombing, the rubble, the heartbreaking shot of the hopeful fireman carrying the toddler from the ruins; below that are what they call their “fire range”: shots of the fireball devouring the compound at Waco, Texas, aerial views of the burned-out homes from a dozen forest fires in Colorado and California.
They have friends, more, perhaps, than most people would expect, a handful of people met in much the same way as Andre met Rebecca but who, like them, would never admit to having a secret, morbid side. Outwardly it all seems so normal, so acceptable, and likely it would be... if not for the way that Andre and Rebecca spend all their available free time: visiting one disaster scene after another, collecting touristy little souvenirs and
postcards, picking up the rarer items through online auctions and, occasionally, via word-of-mouth, black-market buys. Andre believes they have a great life: he and Rebecca are a joining of two souls whom he would have never thought could find each other in a world so concerned with things constantly politically correct and a Miss Manners who dictated everything from whether a person may cross his legs after dinner to how to sign off Instant Messaging. It’s all so completely, utterly perfect....
Except for that one, tiny problem.
Rebecca is getting bored.
Andre can feel it—her blandness—as surely as he can hear his own heart beat with excitement when they stop at the scene of the latest traffic accident, or get in the car to rush to the latest in a series of lethal house fires that has beset the neighborhood adjoining theirs. It is so unthinkable to him, this sudden disinterest she has towards the things around which their relationship has so thoroughly revolved. Disaster and death has always been the crux of everything for them—when they make love, every time, it is to the flickering backdrop of the television’s light as one of their disaster DVDs plays itself out. If her boredom becomes too great, if she actually leaves him, where will he find another woman with whom he can truly share the strangeness of his life and himself?
Losing her is incomprehensible.
He will do anything to keep her affection.
He will stop at nothing to regain her attention.
* * *
For a while, a very short while, the fires work. There are so many, and they are so close and easy to get to while they still burn. The flames reflect in Rebecca’s dark eyes, and Andre can see her exhilaration in the orange lights that dance across her pupils, can feel it in the quickness of her breath as they whisper to each other about the firemen who rush in and out of the building, the ever-increasing number of ambulances and frantic paramedics and burn victims as the elusive arsonist targets larger and larger apartment buildings.
But as to everything, there is an end.
For Andre, it is the danger of being caught that forces him to discontinue his arson spree. Secretly he prides himself on the fact that Rebecca never knew—at least, he doesn’t think she did—that it was he who set the fires, he who arranged for innocents to be sacrificed so that her love for him might continue to be fed by her addiction to the sight, sounds and smells of death. He is still a free man, he knows, only because he is not setting the fires because of a love for the flames themselves. He is not a pyromaniac or someone doing a hasty paid job for insurance money. Because of this, he was always able to step back from his actions and plan them much more clinically, much more critically. There is no one breathing down his neck with threats or offered payment and no logic-destroying physical or mental rush to be gained from watching the fire itself. Andre’s thrill, his “drug,” is watching Rebecca as she watches, so he is meticulous in his methods, infallible in where he procures his materials, untraceable by any evidence. Old high school chemistry books, household materials, planning and prep, utterly random targets and an extreme amount of caution. Detailed, but absurdly easy.
He is never caught, but he also cannot continue.
And Rebecca grows bored again.
She tries to hide it, but Andre can feel it in the way her gaze fails to linger on the victims, the way she shuffles from foot to foot if they stay more than five minutes at any one scene, and most of all, in the way she searches for new ones. Oddly, she begins to spend more time at places where tragedies have already occurred rather than seeking out fresh situations. She starts by bringing flowers to place in the pile in front of a house on the south side where a man went berserk and murdered his girlfriend and her four children before turning the gun on himself, then, incredibly, she flies to the southwest to join the parade of mourners leaving teddy bears and baby toys in front of a storage locker in a nearly nameless dusty town where the mummified remains of three infants were discovered. Andre goes with her, of course, studying Rebecca and the others who stand around these places like silent ghosts and peer through windows and the cracks in locked doors. He tries desperately to understand her sudden desire to revel in the grief that happens after some cataclysmic event, to accept the change that has overtaken her. For him there is no joy in this, no excitement, no need, yet Rebecca’s eyes shine with tears and sorrow, and if wallowing in grief could make a woman more beautiful, then she becomes exquisite. He loves her more than ever.
Back home they go through the motions of cohabitation, but he can see that she finds even less of a thrill in his touch than in the accident scenes that she no longer cares about. Through her, he loses his enthusiasm for the way his life has always been and he, too, stops seeking out the little tragedies that formerly kept him going. His life is as flavorless as dry white toast, and it is all Andre can do not to cry each morning at the sun crests the building and starts another day. He goes to work, he comes home, they grocery shop. He cannot do it himself, but he doesn’t understand why, if he has become such a nothing part of her life, Rebecca doesn’t simply leave him.
Until that final Saturday morning trip to the store, when it all becomes clear.
Painfully so.
* * *
They are crossing Kimble Avenue a little south of Lawrence, jaywalking, and he is mulling, as he so often does these days, on how or what he can do to salvage his relationship with Rebecca. Her hand, the rounded fingernails coated by pale polish, is nestled in the crook of his elbow—despite their emotional distance, she has never stopped holding onto him in public. They pause in the center of the street to let a large delivery truck pass; it has vegetables painted on the side of it in bright, lifelike colors—a vibrant red tomato, a startlingly green pepper, sun-yellow corn. There’s more, an entire assortment of others that Andre does not have time to notice, before Rebecca’s hand slips from his elbow, settles into the small of his back –
– and pushes him.
* * *
From where he is wedged beneath the truck, Andre’s view is limited to a narrow slice of daylight, the distance between the filthy undercarriage of this Ford truck and the surprisingly chilly concrete beneath his cheek. He can’t feel anything else, and he supposes that for this he should consider himself lucky; if he strains his eyes downward in the direction of his torso, he can just glimpse a pool of scarlet, his blood, as it rushes away from the confines of his flesh. There are several dozen pair of feet crisscrossing the horizontal bar of his eyesight, so he must have been unconscious for a bit, long enough to gather a crowd. As he stares, he recognizes a familiar set of sandals; brown leather in a basket pattern with beads woven across the top—he bought them for Rebecca only a week ago.
Andre’s vision is going a disturbing gray around the edges, images bleeding into the roadway until everything seems to have melted at the edges like the cheap special effects he’s seen in a dozen different science fiction movies, the ones where the camera looks at the trappings of planet Earth from the attacking alien’s point of view. The circle in the middle where things are still in focus is growing smaller, but not so much that he doesn’t recognize his beloved Rebecca as she kneels next to the truck and peers underneath; crouching with her is a face he also recognizes, even though it has been at least a year. His hair is still thick and dark brown, and the hungry eyes peering from behind stylish glasses haven’t changed, either, since May 9, 2004—this is the man who was at the bus accident on the same day that Rebecca introduced herself to him. Even his faint, knowing smile is the same, and somehow Andre isn’t surprised when he sees Rebecca slip her hand into the stranger’s and hears her ask him, “Do you think he’s feeling any pain?”
If he could only speak, this time Andre would tell Rebecca that yes, he certainly is.
First appeared in Outsiders anthology published by ROC, Oct. 2005
IXCHEL’S TEARS
By José R. Nieto
I
Walking steadily over packed snow, frigid water seeping into his inadequate boots, Francisco found that
he couldn’t stop thinking about the argument. It had started over nothing: an errand forgotten by Elizabeth, his fiancée; a piece of mail undelivered. Annoyed by her calm disposition, he made the mistake of accusing her of not apologizing enough. Elizabeth in turn accused him of always accepting her apologies.
“What am I supposed to do?” Francisco said, incredulously.
“You’re supposed to say that it’s okay,” Elizabeth responded, “that I shouldn’t worry about it. You should say that you love me, no matter what I do. When you tell me ‘I accept your apology’ in that tone of yours—you know, that official voice you put on—it makes me feel awful, like I’ve done something beyond forgiveness. I mean, does a letter really matter that much to you?” While she spoke Elizabeth squinted her eyes, as if she had trouble focusing.
Francisco shook his head. “It’s just cultural,” he said to dismiss the issue. Often when they disagreed, when he was tired or horny and did not feel like going at length, he was quick to raise the specter of ethnic difference. It saved the effort of a good argument. Because of their disparate backgrounds—he, the product of a large working-class San Juan family; she, from a privileged Boston suburb—the subject carried the weight and significance of a veiled threat. In normal circumstances the mere mention of culture would serve to stymie the most heated debate, almost as if he had drawn a line on the ground, a fragile border that Elizabeth did not dare cross.
This time, though, maybe because of the holidays, or possibly due to the impending nuptials (still six months away), the two of them went on to rehash the rest of their disagreements: city or country residence, casual wedding or formal reception. Foolishly, Francisco revived an old fight about the language and religion of their future children. That one kept them at it until Elizabeth crossed her arms, glanced down at her shoes and started to cry.
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